Google Home: $129 Voice Control for Your House

Google Home is a $129 voice activated personal assistant, like Amazon Alexa, that lets you use your voice to control Nest lights, SmartThings, Philips Hue lights, IFTTT and other devices.

You can also choose to play music with Chromecast Audio. Soon you will be able to use Google Home to voice control Netflix on the Chromecast Ultra. You can also start playing music on a variety of services including Spotify and YouTube.

The Google Home release date is November 4th through the Google Store, Best Buy, Walmart and Target.

The Amazon Alexa voice control service is similar, but it doesn’t deliver the same set of features. One difference is the inclusion of controls on the top of Google Home that allow you to play, pause and change the volume of your music.

You can also mute the device by tapping a button on the back when you don’t want the service to listen to you. The base of Google Home is swappable to change the look of the service.

One new feature si My Day, which basically takes Google Cards from Google Now to deliver a daily briefing for you before you leave the house.

If you place multiple Google Home devices around your house the system will know which one is closest and only activate that when you say “Ok. Google.”

https://youtu.be/nWiIWyCeZso

Watch the video above for an overview of what the Home device can do. The company announced this at a special event in October.

Google also announced the Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones, Google WiFi, the Chromecast Ultra and Google Daydream at this event.